“History” and “progress” are concepts that Japanese learned from the West. In the Western way of seeing things, human societies are all moving down the same path toward a single objective, and differences in location mean that some are in the lead while others lag behind. Of all the things Japan learned from the West, this idea is among the most basic: Humankind is progressing along a single path and that is the path of history. I think this notion was quite new to Japanese. Having once been taught this way of viewing things, Japanese of the mid-nineteenth century compared themselves to Westerners and saw how far apart―how far “behind”―they stood. There was nothing to do but move ahead, to catch up and advance to superiority and glory. And Japanese thought that the way to accomplish this would be simple: just do things the way Westerners do. They began to study everything assiduously, from political and economic institutions to industry, transportation, education, and the arts. The most important thing to be learned, because it related to everything else, was language. Language, being not only one among the subjects learned from the West, but also the means without which all those things could not be acquired, was also the target of discussion for reform. Even before the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the high-ranking shogunal official Maejima Hisoka (1835-1919) proposed that use of Chinese characters (kanji) be abolished, and particularly in the first two decades following the change of government, various theories advocating radical reform of the language were debated. The advocates of language reform could be divided into two main schools. One consisted of those who asserted that Japan should make English the national language of Japan. The best thing to do, they were convinced, was to abandon completely the “inferior” Japanese language and adopt English as the vernacular, both written and spoken. From our contemporary perspective, such a step might seem rather rash, yet there were in fact numerous cases in which weaker peoples switched completely to the language of a dominant people―even today there are quite a few countries where communication in educated circles goes on in a foreign language (for example, English or French) ―so it was not really such an outlandish idea. Nevertheless, it would probably have been impossible to achieve in Japan. The other argument on modernization of the language centered on changing to a writing system based on phonetic characters, either alphabetic or syllabic. The biggest difference between Western languages and Japanese is that the former are all written using phonetic alphabets, whereas Japanese depends heavily on Chinese ideograms (in combination with phonetic syllabaries). Advocates argued that since the “advanced languages” use phonetic characters, Japan should also adopt a phonetic writing system, thereby moving its language into the modern age. The government made conversion of the writing system to phonetic characters a policy objective. Opinion was divided, however, over what form this should take. There were two camps: those who argued for doing away with kanji (some 40,000 to 50,000 characters could be used) and relying solely on the kana or phonetic syllabaries (hiragana and katakana, 48 of each type), and those who were convinced that the ideograms and the kana should be completely done away with and replaced with roman orthography . Implementation of this policy, however, made no progress whatsoever. As explained in the second part of this article (see Japanese Book News, No. 24), thousands of new kanji compounds had been coined in order to translate the many new foreign words introduced in the process of modernization, and many of them were homophones. Without those new words, the westernization that was taking place in the lives and activities of the people would not have progressed. The usage of those new words, moreover, depended on the characters. The word joki, for instance can mean both “steam” and “excitement,” and the meaning can only be determined by the kanji or the context. Given the large number of homophones, confusion would have been rampant. The usages of kanji had dramatically increased by comparison with pre-1868 times; government, industry, scholarship, and education would have come to a standstill without them (to be precise, without the Western words and concepts that had been translated using ideograms). Abolishing the use of kanji might have succeeded, albeit at great sacrifice, if it had been attempted before the end of the Edo period, before the influx of all the new vocabulary, but by the 1870s-1880s, it was too late. This was not entirely evident, however, to many people at the time.

The Language Reform Movement In the early twentieth century, the government set up an official commission, the Kokugo Chosa Iinkai or National Language Research Council. This council is a government organ whose ultimate objective is to make Japanese into something like a Western language, in short, to confine its orthography to phonetic characters. Save for a short interruption, the council has continued to exist for nearly one hundred years until the present day, and its purpose has not essentially changed. In 1934, its Japanese name was changed to the Kokugo Shingikai (National Language Council, NLC). For about forty years from the time of its founding, the NLC drew up repeated proposals and presented them to the government, but none of them became the basis of government ordinances to implement the exclusive use of phonetic characters throughout the country (or even in part of it). Each time such proposals were made, strong protests would arise from various sectors. The council’s recommendations were always divided into two parts. One consisted of reforms of kana usage and rules for writing words based on the way they were actually spoken. The other consisted of proposals to determine the overall number of characters permitted for official use, with a view to curtailing the number of kanji as the first step in ultimately abolishing them altogether. The advocates of switching to a kana orthography and those arguing for the romanization of Japanese script and the organizations that backed them continued to be active, and until the end of World War II, the language reform movement was led by the NLC, kana-advocacy groups, and proponents of romanization. From around 1920 onward, representatives of the leading national newspapers made up the largest proportion of NLC members. Newspapers had to be printed with great speed, and since fewer characters would mean greater speed in typesetting and printing, the newspapers were eager to see the number of characters decreased to the lowest possible number. The romanization movement was led by scholars in the natural sciences. Scientists wanted a Japanese orthography in which it would be possible to incorporate Western language terms used in their writings just as they were (in horizontally written, romanized characters). The kana-advocacy movement was made up of people outside of government who disliked kanji for one reason or other. What all three groups active in the movement for language reform initially had in common was their conviction that language was simply a tool for expressing one’s will. If language is merely a tool, it made sense to improve it and make it more convenient to use. As research continued, however, people gradually came to realize that language may be used as a tool of expression, but is also inextricably linked to matters of spirit and tradition. Those who had studied linguistics in university were rarely part of the language reform movement; indeed, they were often its outspoken opponents. The end of World War II with defeat for Japan presented the members of the NLC with a golden opportunity. Japan has lost the war, some opinion leaders argued, not just because of the deficiencies of its armed forces and economic resources, but because its culture was inferior to that of the West. That cultural inferiority ultimately ought to be blamed, they held, on the shortcomings of the language and the orthography. In November 1945, the influential Yomiuri daily newspaper published an editorial entitled “Kanji Should be Abolished,” which argued that if kanji were done away with and roman script adopted, Japan would become an efficient country like the United States and would progress steadily toward cultural advancement and civilian government. In 1946, the U.S. Education Mission to Japan presented a directive to the Japanese government to the effect that it should abolish kanji and adopt roman script. In the same year, the NLC, too, presented another of its proposals on language reform; and this time their proposal, consisting of two parts―adoption of phonetically consistent rules of the syllabary and restrictions on the use of kanji to 1,850 characters―was immediately made into a government ordinance. One of the members of the NLC who played a leading role at this time was a man named Matsusaka Tadanori. Born in poor circumstances, Matsusaka had not been able to attend elementary school regularly and had had great difficulty in mastering kanji. Resentment of the barrier presented by kanji led him to champion the kana cause for many years. Ultimately the number of characters for daily use (toyo kanji) was fixed at 1,850, and he was the one who adamantly opposed any attempt to increase it by even one character. All government institutions and schools were required to conform with the stipulations of this ordinance and the newspapers as well immediately set out to implement it. The grand issue that had been debated and studied since the mid-nineteenth century was suddenly settled by imposing it upon the government apparatus, the schools, and the press. Gradually, scholars and other intellectuals who had left Tokyo during the war began to return, but it was several years after this ordinance went into effect that they began to raise their voices in protest, calling on the Ministry of Education to rescind the language reforms. The MOE had no intention of turning back, but it became clear that complete conversion to a phonetic orthography would not happen as quickly as supporters of national language reform had initially envisioned. The NLC continues to exist today, but it is now a very moderate body. No longer driven by the mandate to attain the ideal phonetic form of the language, it does not display much energy regarding fundamental review of postwar language reforms. In the last fifty years, the number of characters permitted for regular use has slightly increased, a step taken as a result of demands from the newspapers―which had been the strongest champions of limiting the number of kanji-saying it was difficult to write articles within the 1,850 kanji limit.

Having adopted the use of Chinese characters, as described in the first article in this series, the Japanese language came to be composed of two major vocabularies. One is wago or yamato-kotoba, both of which refer to the indigenous words of Japan used before Chinese and its orthography were introduced. The indigenous name for ancient Japan was “Yamato”; expressed in Chinese style it was called “Wa.” The indigenous word for words or language is kotoba, while the Chinese-style term is go: yamato-kotoba and wago, therefore, are two different ways of saying the same thing. As discussed in the previous issue, the development of the Yamato vernacular came virtually to a halt with the introduction of Chinese orthography, so very few words of indigenous origin have been coined since. Modern language has been enriched by continuous borrowing from other languages, but the indigenous language was suspended in its infancy. The other major vocabulary in Japanese is kango. “Kan” means China or Chinese, and “go,” as noted above, means “words” or “language.” These words are of Chinese origin and are customarily written in kanji, Japan’s ideograms. Their pronunciation is not a close approximation of the original Chinese sound, but in Japanized, simplified sounds. Over the more than one thousand years since Chinese and Chinese characters were introduced to Japan, in addition, a wide variety of words have evolved that lie somewhere in between wago and kango. One type of these in-between words are so called “Japan-made” or newly coined kango. These words are always written with Chinese characters and read with Chinese readings, so they have all the appearance of ordinary kango, but in fact were invented in Japan. For many of these words there is no direct connection between the kanji used to write them and the meaning of the word. Examples are yakunin 役人 (official; public servant) and karo 家老 (high-ranking official in local administration of the domains under Japan’s pre-modern feudal system). Other examples are banto 番頭 (a clerk or manager of a shop) and detchi 丁稚 (shop apprentice) . While the characters and the meaning are not closely related, you can tell the sounds have been chosen carefully in order to form an easy-to-understand combination. Few of these words have homonyms of different meaning. There are also many words that combine the features of wago and kango. Among the oldest is shiragiku 白菊, “white chrysanthemum.” Shira (shiro) is the wago meaning “white,” and kiku is a kango meaning chrysanthemum (in Japanese, the k- becomes the voiced g- in combination with a preceding word). We may call these the hybrid wago-kango vocabulary. The Japanese language today is, strictly speaking, composed of four vocabularies: wago, kango, the coined or hybrid vocabulary, and words of Western origin, seiyogo. Most Japanese today are hardly conscious of these distinctions, except perhaps for words of Western derivation. They make no association between kango and Chinese, which stands to reason, as that vocabulary has been part of strictly Japanese usage for more than a thousand years.

Watershed of Language Given the coexistence of different vocabularies as outlined above, one might imagine that confusion reigned throughout the several-hundred years of the history of the Japanese language. In fact, the situation did not cause undue complications until the end of the Edo period (1603-1867), or more precisely, until about 1870, Up to that time, the spoken language of the intelligentsia (the majority of which consisted of samurai, the warrior class) was sprinkled with a certain number of kango and all official documents and records were written exclusively in kanji characters. For the language of everyday life as far as ordinary people were concerned, wago, enriched by some hybrid vocabulary, were quite sufficient. The complications and confusion began following the Meiji Restoration, which toppled the feudal regime that had unified and governed the country since 1603 and established a new, modem-style government. Two antithetical movements occurred simultaneously regarding the language. One was the massive use of kanji, now without regard to sound, but utilizing only their meaning. This led to the emergence of countless words that could not be understood from sound alone. Indeed they often make no sense unless you look at the characters. The other movement was one seeking to adopt a phonetic orthography, which was based on the assumption that since words were essentially sounds, all the orthography had to do was to express the sounds. In this issue, let us take a look at the former movement, the unprecedented proliferation of kanji words. Following the formation of the Meiji government, Japan embarked on a remarkable endeavor to adopt everything possible from Western civilization. It borrowed not only governmental and economic institutions but industries in every field, architectural techniques and styles, means of transportation and communication, schools and other educational institutions, fields of scholarly and artistic endeavor, not to mention clothing, food, and articles of household use. In every field, with every borrowing, came new words and new terminology. These had to be expressed in Japanese, so kanji characters were mobilized and tens of thousands of kango were coined. The newly introduced kanji words can be divided into two types. One makes use of words found in the ancient Chinese classics. Naturally, there was a large gap between ancient China and the modern West, but Japanese searched for terms that more-or-less resembled the meaning required, in a process one might call recycling obsolete words. The word hoken (the translation of “feudalism”) is one such term. The overall number of these overhauled words, however, is not large. The vast majority of words to translate phenomena and terms from the West were newly coined. Most of them were made by combining two kanji in a compound, and when that was not sufficient sometimes three kanji. For things related to electricity, for example, the character den 電, meaning electricity, was used to create many words: densen 電線 (electric line), dento 電灯 (electric lamp), denpo 電報 (telegram), and denwa 電話 (telephone). “Japan-made” kango differ greatly in character before and after the beginning of the Meiji era. Until the end of the Edo period they were predominantly terms, as mentioned earlier, in which the characters (usually two) of which they were composed were not closely related to the meaning. The sounds, on the other hand, were distinctive.

Japan did not have an orthography until more than 1,500 years ago, when Chinese characters were introduced sometime before the third century. Some people might conclude that Japan lacked an orthography until that time because its culture was backward, but it would be more correct to say that China’s culture simply emerged much earlier, while that of Japan came later. The superiority or inferiority of cultures, as with people, has nothing to do with how early or late they were born. Japanese culture, as it happened, emerged long after Chinese culture had considerably advanced, so at the time the two came into contact, its language was not yet fully developed and it did not yet have a writing system of its own. Japan, Korea, and China are often lumped together culturally because they all use Chinese ideographs (known in Japan as kanji) for their orthographies, and the assumption made that they belong to the Chinese linguistic family. In actuality, Japanese evolved from entirely different roots. Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan family of languages along with Tibetan, Thai, and Burmese. The origins from which Japanese evolved have not, in fact, been clearly established (some scholars assert that it is related to the Tamil language of southern India, but I do not believe this has been substantiated); there is no other related language anywhere on earth. Not only is Japanese of totally separate linguistic roots from Chinese; its grammar, syntax, and phonetics are completely different, as I shall show below. Surely Japanese is indebted to Chinese, most might think, for having provided it with a writing system. By implication the adoption of kanji to write Japanese must have been fortunate. But this, too, is a misconception. Indeed, it was not so fortunate. Why unfortunate? First, because the adoption of kanji effectively brought an end to the development of the indigenous language. Japanese at the time had developed to the point where it could express the specific and concrete (such as things one can see and hear), but there was little to express the abstract or conceptual. It could identify things individually but did not have terms to describe them generally or abstractly. In other words, the language was still in its infancy. If it had continued to grow naturally, no doubt the vocabulary of generalization and conceptualization would have evolved in due course. As it was, kanji were introduced- (and it must be remembered that the orthography came from China, then a far more highly developed civilization than that of Japan), and Chinese words themselves were adopted. From that time, the indigenous language lost the capacity to coin new words and concepts truly its own. The second reason that kanji are not such a boon to Japanese is that they were meant, obviously, for writing Chinese. The relationship between the Chinese language and its writing system is virtually ideal. Considering the nature of a vernacular and its orthography, Chinese is perhaps one of the most highly perfected, sophisticated languages in the entire world. That did not mean, however, that kanji were necessarily the ideal orthography for just any other language. Suppose, for instance, that there was no orthography for writing down the English language, and that the only orthography that existed in the world was Chinese ideographs. English would have to be expressed using kanji. Just imagine how difficult that would be. Yet that was exactly the situation that Japanese faced in antiquity. Chinese and Japanese were linguistically so completely different that the adoption of kanji caused great consternation and confusion. Indeed, those difficulties have continued over many centuries to this very day. But at the time, Japanese had no alternative but to adopt Chinese: it was the only orthography available to them. As far as they knew, this writing system was not just the writing system of China; it was the sole orthography in use by human civilization.